Thursday, February 17, 2011

HFM Dimensions

Dimensions describe an organization’s data and usually contain groups of related members.

Examples of dimensions are Account, Entity, and Period. Financial Management

supplies eight system-defined dimensions and enables you to populate up to four custom dimensions that you can apply to accounts. Dimension members are

arranged in hierarchies. Upper-level members are called parent members, and a

member immediately below a parent member is referred to as the child of a parent member. All members below a parent are referred to as descendants. The bottom level hierarchy members are called base-level-members.

Scenario Dimension

The Scenario dimension represents a set of data, such as Budget, Actual, or

Forecast. For example, the Actual scenario can contain data from a general ledger, reflecting past and current business operations. The Budget scenario can contain data that reflects the targeted business operations. The Forecast scenario typically contains data that corresponds to predictions for upcoming periods. A Legal scenario can contain data calculated according to legal GAAP format and rules. You can define any number of scenarios for an application and define attributes for Scenario dimension members, such as the default frequency, the default view, and zero data settings.

Year Dimension

The Year dimension represents the fiscal or calendar year for data. An application can contain data for more than one year. You specify a year range when you create the application and select a year from the Year dimension to process data.

Period Dimension

The Period dimension represents time periods, such as quarters and months. It

contains time periods and frequencies by displaying the time periods in a hierarchy. For example, if the Actual scenario maintains data on a monthly basis,

generally 12 periods of data are available for this scenario in a year. Financial

Management supports years, months, and weeks for the period dimension. It does not support days for the dimension.

Entity Dimension

The Entity dimension represents the organizational structure of the company, such as the management and legal reporting structures. Entities can represent divisions, subsidiaries, plants, regions, countries, legal entities, business units, departments, or any organizational unit. You can define any number of entities. The Entity dimension is the consolidation dimension of the system. Hierarchies in the Entity dimension reflect various consolidated views of the data. Various hierarchies can correspond to geographic consolidation, legal consolidation, or consolidation by activity. All relationships among individual member components that exist in an organization are stored and maintained in this dimension. Entities in an organization are dependent, base, or parent entities. Dependent entities are owned by other entities in the organization. Base entities are at the bottom of the organization structure and do not own other entities. Parent entities contain one or more dependents that report directly to them. You define attributes for Entity dimension members, such as the default currency and security class, and to specify whether the entity allows adjustments and stores intercompany detail.

Value Dimension

The Value dimension represents the different types of values stored in your

application, and can include the input currency, parent currency, adjustments, and consolidation detail such as proportion, elimination, and contribution detail. For example, the Entity Currency member stores the value for an entity in its local currency. The Parent Currency member stores the value for an entity translated the currency of its parent entity.

Account Dimension

The Account dimension represents a hierarchy of natural accounts. Accounts store financial data for entities and scenarios in an application. Each account has a type, such as Revenue or Expense that defines its accounting behavior.

You define attributes for Account dimension members, such as the account type, the number of decimal places to display, and whether the account is a calculated,

consolidated, or intercompany partner account.

Intercompany Dimension

The Intercompany dimension represents all intercompany balances that exist for

an account. This is a reserved dimension that is used in combination with the

Account dimension and any custom dimension. Financial Management can track

and eliminate intercompany transaction details across accounts and entities. You

can also run intercompany matching reports to view intercompany transactions.

View Dimension

The View dimension represents various modes of calendar intelligence; for

example, Periodic, Year-to-Date, and Quarter-to-Date frequencies. If you set the

view to Periodic, the values for each month are displayed. If you set the view to

Year-to-Date or Quarter-to-Date, the cumulative values for the year or quarter are displayed.

Custom Dimensions

Four custom dimensions are available for analysis of detailed data. You can use

custom dimensions to store additional details associated with accounts, such as